Auschwitz, Dachau, the Warsaw Ghetto... These are names that resonate with anyone who knows the story of the Holocaust. Most people are shocked, however, to learn just how many camps, ghettos, and other sites of detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder the Nazis and their allies ran: over 42,000. Likewise, few people know much about the conditions in those places, or how broad the range of prisoner experiences was.

In order to fill this vast gap in our knowledge, the Museum and Indiana University Press are compiling and publishing an Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Specifically, the work aims to answer basic questions about as many individual sites as possible; to provide scholars with leads for additional research; and to memorialize the places where so many millions of people suffered and died.

Work on this enormous project began in 1999; it involves a small team of editors, writers, and researchers at the Museum, plus hundreds of volunteers and scholars from all over the world. Three volumes have already appeared, and four more are in preparation. When it is complete, the Encyclopedia will be the most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the Nazi camp system in existence.

The Museum would like to thank the following donors, without whose support the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos could not exist:

Volume I has received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award, the 2010 Judaica Reference Award (external link) from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and Library Journal’s Best of Reference 2009. It was also designated a Choice magazine 2010 Outstanding Academic Title.

Volume II

This volume provides a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German administrative regions. Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto's liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites—previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust—make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

Germany was obviously central to the Holocaust, but it did not act alone. Volume III of the Encyclopedia describes over 700 sites in Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia, as well as in French and Italian colonies in Africa, and in Italian-occupied territories in Europe. These were the places where allies of Germany, satellite states, and collaborationist governments imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, and killed the people they and the Germans considered enemies: Jews, Roma and Sinti, political opponents, and colonial subjects, among others. Experts on and from the countries in question drew on records in 14 different languages, from a multitude of archives, in order to write the entries. Introductory essays on each of the countries provide background information on broader developments having to do with the various camp systems. This volume is the one single source for information on these sites, in any language.

“This magnificent collective effort, uniting the research and expertise of leading scholars from around the world, provides a fundamental new reference for the history of the Holocaust. Anyone who wishes to understand the variety of Jewish experience in the ghettos and the scale of the destruction of a whole European world must consult this encyclopedia.”